Nuevos ciudadanos en el espacio publico

Acaba de nacer una ciudad big brother. IBM ha elegido a la cobaya de moda, Río de Janeiro, para aplicar su concepto smarter city de control y gestión de datos. La propaganda bidireccional (gobierno local y sector privado) es redonda: la ciudad es smart (inteligente) y controlaremos todos los datos (tráfico, contaminación, temperatura, flujos) de la urbe. Pero las críticas a este concepto  de ciudad inteligente burocrática y top down son redondísimas y demoledoras. 

El arte de reconocer preexistencias

L'art de reconèixer preexistències

Sovint confonem la globalització de les relacions amb la preterició de cada lloc concret

Els orientals et tornen el canvi amb les dues mans. Tot el que intercanvien ho presenten així. És la cortesa actitud de qui fa ofrenes. La litúrgia cristiana, hereva de la gestualitat oriental, encara conserva aquesta simetria de posats. Els occidentals l'hem perduda. Allarguem apressadament una sola mà amb el bitllet o l'objecte i ni tan sols busquem la mirada de l'altre. De tan pragmàtics, fem angúnia. El nostre gest no passa de braceig. Moltes màquines resulten més atentes.

El gests són més importants que no semblen. Tradueixen la manera de pensar. Als occidentals, la tecnologia ens ha fet irreverents. Més ben dit, insensibles. Un perruquer japonès em deia que abans de tallar els cabells cal mirar la inclinació de les arrels. La cabellera no és una massa amorfa i isotròpica que es pugui remenar com una escombra. Les preexistències són determinants, perquè no creem objectes, només transformem coses ja existents, sigui fang, cabells o paisatges.

L'urbanisme i l'arquitectura moderns ho han perdut de vista. Massa sovint, no tenen sentit del lloc. Confonen la globalització de les relacions amb la preterició de les localitzacions. No miren el fol·licle pil·lós i el caient del cabell, van de dret al cop de tisora. Després ho aguanten tot amb laca i fixador. Per això torna el bioclimatisme, propi de l'arquitectura de tota la vida. Massa eines i massa poc coneixement. No hi ha cases en general: hi ha aquesta casa aquí o aquella altra allà. Edificar és modificar un lloc, no contrariar-lo construint-hi.

El sostenibilisme deu ser l'art de reconèixer preexistències. Com són les coses, què cal fer per dur l'aigua al nostre molí sense engegar-ho tot enlaire. Podríem començar tornant el cavi amb les dues mans i mirant als ulls el nostre interlocutor. Hi retrobaríem un altre ésser humà. Després, girant la vista, començaríem a veure el món. A partir d'aquí, entendríem el sol i la pluja, el vent i les pujades. Faríem sense desfer.

*Article publicat a El Periódico de Catalunya

Ramon Folch
Socioecòleg, Director general d'ERF
30-01-2012

Smarth Growth Codes

The Pol Pot of Architecture

The Architect as Totalitarian
Le  Corbusier's baleful influence
Theodore Dalrymple

Le Corbusier was to architecture what Pol Pot was to social reform. In one sense, he had less excuse for his activities than Pol Pot: for unlike the Cambodian, he possessed great talent, even genius. Unfortunately, he turned his gifts to destructive ends, and it is no coincidence that he willingly served both Stalin and Vichy. Like Pol Pot, he wanted to start from Year Zero: before me, nothing; after me, everything. By their very presence, the raw-concrete-clad rectangular towers that obsessed him canceled out centuries of architecture. Hardly any town or city in Britain (to take just one nation) has not had its composition wrecked by architects and planners inspired by his ideas.

Writings about Le Corbusier often begin with an encomium to his importance, something like: “He was the most important architect of the twentieth century.” Friend and foe would agree with this judgment, but importance is, of course, morally and aesthetically ambiguous. After all, Lenin was one of the most important politicians of the twentieth century, but it was his influence on history, not his merits, that made him so: likewise Le Corbusier.

Yet just as Lenin was revered long after his monstrosity should have been obvious to all, so Le Corbusier continues to be revered. Indeed, there is something of a revival in the adulation. Nicholas Fox Weber has just published an exhaustive and generally laudatory biography, and Phaidon has put out a huge, expensive book lovingly devoted to Le Corbusier’s work. Further, a hagiographic exhibition devoted to Le Corbusier recently ran in London and Rotterdam. In London, the exhibition fittingly took place in a hideous complex of buildings, built in the 1960s, called the Barbican, whose concrete brutalism seems designed to overawe, humiliate, and confuse any human being unfortunate enough to try to find his way in it. The Barbican was not designed by Le Corbusier, but it was surely inspired by his particular style of soulless architecture.

At the exhibition, I fell to talking with two elegantly coiffed ladies of the kind who spend their afternoons in exhibitions. “Marvelous, don’t you think?” one said to me, to which I replied: “Monstrous.” Both opened their eyes wide, as if I had denied Allah’s existence in Mecca. If most architects revered Le Corbusier, who were we laymen, the mere human backdrop to his buildings, who know nothing of the problems of building construction, to criticize him? Warming to my theme, I spoke of the horrors of Le Corbusier’s favorite material, reinforced concrete, which does not age gracefully but instead crumbles, stains, and decays. A single one of his buildings, or one inspired by him, could ruin the harmony of an entire townscape, I insisted. A Corbusian building is incompatible with anything except itself.

The two ladies mentioned that they lived in a mainly eighteenth-century part of the city whose appearance and social atmosphere had been comprehensively wrecked by two massive concrete towers. The towers confronted them daily with their own impotence to do anything about the situation, making them sad as well as angry. “And who do you suppose was the inspiration for the towers?” I asked. “Yes, I see what you mean,” one of them said, as if the connection were a difficult and even dangerous one to make.

I pointed the ladies to an area of the exhibition devoted to the Plan Voisin, Le Corbusier’s scheme to replace a large quarter of Paris with buildings of fundamentally the same design as those that graced the outskirts of Novosibirsk and every other Soviet city (to say nothing of Paris itself and its alienated banlieues). If carried out, the plan would have changed, dominated, and, in my view, destroyed the appearance of the entire city. Here, the exhibition played a 1920s film showing Le Corbusier in front of a map of the center of Paris, a large part of which he proceeds to scrub out with a thick black crayon with all the enthusiasm of Bomber Harris planning the annihilation of a German city during World War II.

Le Corbusier extolled this kind of destructiveness as imagination and boldness, in contrast with the conventionality and timidity of which he accused all contemporaries who did not fall to their knees before him. It says something of the spirit of destruction that still lives on in Europe that such a film should be displayed to evoke not horror and disgust, or even laughter, but admiration.

Le Corbusier was born Charles-Édouard Jeanneret in 1887, in the small French-Swiss town of La Chaux-de-Fonds, where his father was an engraver of watchcases and his mother a musician. His father wanted him to follow in his footsteps; but as an adolescent, Le Corbusier showed precocious artistic ability, attended the local school of fine arts for a time, and then wandered Europe for several years in a program of aesthetic self-education. His extraordinary abilities were evident in the brilliant draftsmanship of his early (and conventional) drawings and watercolors. He also made furniture of great elegance before the bug of intellectual and artistic revolutionism bit him.

Le Corbusier adopted his pseudonym in the 1920s, deriving it in part from the name of a distant ancestor, Lecorbésier. But in the absence of a first name, it suggests a physical force as much as a human being. It brings to mind the verb courber, to bend, and, of course, Le Corbusier was a great bender of townscapes to his own will. It also brings to mind le corbeau, the crow or raven, not a conventionally beautiful bird in plumage or song, but one that is simple and unornamental in both and therefore, metaphorically speaking, honest and undeceiving, as Le Corbusier claimed his architecture to be. In French, le corbeau has a further meaning: that of a bird of ill omen—and perhaps that is the architect’s little joke upon the world. He was certainly of ill omen for the cities of Europe and elsewhere.

Le Corbusier’s influence came about as much through his writings as through anything he built—perhaps more. His mode of writing is disjointed, without apparent logical structure, aphoristic, and with frequent resort to the word “must,” as if no sentient being with an IQ over 50 could or would argue with what he says. Drawings and photos often accompany his writing, but sometimes so cryptically in relation to the text that the reader begins to doubt his own powers of comprehension: he is made to think that he is reading a book by someone on a completely different—higher—intellectual plane. Architecture becomes a sacred temple that hoi polloi may not enter.

André Wogenscky of the Fondation Le Corbusier, prefacing an anthology of Le Corbusier’s writings, claims that his master’s words are not measurable by normal means: “We cannot simply understand the books; we have to surrender to them, resonate, in the acoustical sense, with their vibrations, the ebb and flow of his thinking.” The passage brings to mind what the poet Tyutchev said about Russia: one had to believe in it because no one could measure it with his mind. In approaching Le Corbusier in this mystical fashion, Wogenscky is, in practice, bowing down to a peculiarly vengeful god: namely, reinforced concrete, Le Corbusier’s favorite material.

Le Corbusier managed to communicate this elitist attitude to his followers, apologists, and hierophants. Here, for example, is a passage from a book about him by the architect Stephen Gardiner:

Le Corbusier remains, for many people, an enigma. Probably the chief [reason] is the vastness of architecture, for this means that it is an art that is difficult to comprehend. . . . And, while buildings are large, cities are even larger: here, before us, is an immensely elaborate patchwork threaded with a multiplicity of strands that lead in from all directions. At first it seems quite impossible to see a clear picture where there is, in fact, order, shape and continuity: all we see is a jumble. Yet it is at this point that one may make the discovery that the pattern is not possible to follow because a crucial piece of the jigsaw is missing. . . . In the twentieth century, Le Corbusier provides it.

Has anyone ever stood, overlooking, say, the Grand Canal in Venice, and thought, “What I need in order to understand this is the missing piece of the jigsaw with which only an architect can provide me, and only then will I understand it”? Gardiner is a true disciple of Le Corbusier in his desire to intellectualize without the exercise of intellect, in his failure to make elementary distinctions, and in his use of words so ambiguous that it is difficult to argue conclusively against him.

In fairness to Le Corbusier, three extenuations can be offered for his life’s appalling work. He came to maturity in an age when new industrial materials and methods made possible a completely different architecture from any previously known. The destruction in northern France during World War I, as well as social conditions generally, necessitated swift rebuilding on a large scale, a problem that no one else solved satisfactorily. And he had grown up at a time when bourgeois domestic clutter—heavy, elaborate gilt-and-plush furniture; knickknacks everywhere—was often so outrageous that an extreme revulsion against it in the form of militant bareness and absence of adornment was understandable, though not necessarily laudable (the diametrical opposite of an outrage is more likely itself to be an outrage than to be a solution to it).

Nevertheless, Le Corbusier’s language reveals his disturbingly totalitarian mind-set. For example, in what is probably his most influential book, the 1924 Towards a New Architecture (the very title suggests that the world had been waiting for him), he writes poetically:

We must create a mass-production state of mind:

A state of mind for building mass-production housing.

A state of mind for living in mass-production housing.

A state of mind for conceiving mass-production housing.

Who are these “we” of whom he speaks so airily, responsible for creating, among other things, universal states of mind? Only one answer is possible: Le Corbusier and his disciples (of whom there were, alas, to be many). Everyone else has “eyes that do not see,” as he so tolerantly puts it.

Here are a few more musts:

We must see to the establishment of standards so that we can face up to the problem of perfection.

Man must be built upon this axis [of harmony], in perfect agreement with nature, and, probably, the universe.

We must find and apply new methods, clear methods allowing us to work out useful plans for the home, lending themselves naturally to standardization, industrialization, Taylorization.

The plan must rule. . . . The street must disappear.

And then there is this similar assertion: “The masonry wall no longer has a right to exist.”

Le Corbusier wanted architecture to be the same the world over because he believed that there was a “correct” way to build and that only he knew what it was. The program of the International Congress for Modern Architecture, of which Le Corbusier was the moving spirit, states: “Reforms are extended simultaneously to all cities, to all rural areas, across the seas.” No exceptions. “Oslo, Moscow, Berlin, Paris, Algiers, Port Said, Rio or Buenos Aires, the solution is the same,” Le Corbusier maintained, “since it answers the same needs.”

Le Corbusier’s imperatives apply to more than building or even city planning, for he was nothing if not a totalitarian philosopher, whose views on architecture derived at least in part from his self-appointedly omnicompetent viewpoint:

We must create farms, tools, machinery and homes conducive to a clean, healthy well-ordered life. We must organize the village to fulfill its role as a center that will provide for the needs of the farm and act as a distributor of its products. We must kill off the old voracious and ruthless kind of money and create new, honest money, a tool for the fulfillment of a wholly normal, wholly natural function.

There is to be no escape from Le Corbusier’s prescriptions. “The only possible road is that of enthusiasm . . . the mobilization of enthusiasm, that electric power source of the human factory.” In his book The Radiant City, there is a picture of a vast crowd in Venice’s Piazza San Marco, with the legend, “Little by little, the world is moving to its destined goal. In Moscow, in Rome, in Berlin, in the USA, vast crowds are collecting round a strong idea”—the idea being, apparently, the absolute leader or state.

These words were written in 1935, not a happy period for political thought in Moscow, Rome, or Berlin, and one might have hoped that he would have later recanted them. But in 1964, on republishing the book in English, Le Corbusier, far from recanting anything, wrote as an envoi: “Have you ever thought, all you ‘Mister NOS!,’ that these plans were filled with the total and disinterested passion of a man who has spent his whole life concerning himself with his ‘fellow man,’ concerning himself fraternally. And, for this very reason, the more he was in the right the more he upset the arrangements or schemes of others.”

Among these fraternal plans were many for the destruction of whole cities, including Stockholm. (Other cities he planned to destroy: Paris, Moscow, Algiers, Barcelona, Rio de Janeiro, Montevideo, Buenos Aires, Antwerp, and Geneva.) In The Radiant City, Le Corbusier provides an aerial photograph of Stockholm as it was, an astonishingly beautiful assemblage of buildings that he saw only as “frightening chaos and saddening monotony.” He dreamed of “cleaning and purging” the city, importing “a calm and powerful architecture”—that is to say, the purportedly true variety that steel, plate glass, and reinforced concrete as designed by him brought with them. Le Corbusier never got to destroy Stockholm, but architects inspired by his doctrines have gone a fair way toward doing so. As the blurb to the 1964 edition of The Radiant City prophetically puts it, the book is “a blueprint for the present and the future . . . a classic work on architecture and city planning.”

A terminal inhumanity—what one might almost call “ahumanity”—characterizes Le Corbusier’s thought and writing, notwithstanding his declarations of fraternity with mankind. This manifests itself in several ways, including in his thousands of architectural photos and drawings, in which it is rare indeed that a human figure ever appears, and then always as a kind of distant ant, unfortunately spoiling an otherwise immaculate, Platonic townscape. Thanks to his high-rise buildings, Le Corbusier says, 95 percent of the city surface shall become parkland—and he then shows a picture of a wooded park without a single human figure present. Presumably, the humans will be where they should be, out of sight and out of mind (the architect’s mind, anyway), in their machines for living in (as he so charmingly termed houses), sitting on machines for sitting on (as he defined chairs).

This ahumanity explains Le Corbusier’s often-expressed hatred of streets and love of roads. Roads were impressive thoroughfares for rushing along at the highest possible speed (he had an obsession with fast cars and airplanes), which therefore had a defined purpose and gave rise to no disorderly human interactions. The street, by contrast, was unpredictable, incalculable, and deeply social. Le Corbusier wanted to be to the city what pasteurization is to cheese.

When one recalls Le Corbusier’s remark about reinforced concrete—“my reliable, friendly concrete”—one wonders if he might have been suffering from a degree of Asperger’s syndrome: that he knew that people talked, walked, slept, and ate, but had no idea that anything went on in their heads, or what it might be, and consequently treated them as if they were mere things. Also, people with Asperger’s syndrome often have an obsession with some ordinary object or substance: reinforced concrete, say.

Le Corbusier’s hatred of the human went well beyond words, of course. What he called the “roof garden” of his famous concrete apartment block in Marseilles, the Unité d’Habitation, consists of a flat concrete surface in which protrude several raw concrete abstract shapes and walls. Le Corbusier wanted no other kind of roof henceforth to be built anywhere, and wrote passionately denouncing all other “primitive” kinds of roof. One might have hoped that Le Corbusier’s characterization of this concrete wasteland as a garden would have occasioned derision; instead, pictures of it are reproduced as evidence of his inventive genius.

The only city Le Corbusier ever built, Chandigarh in India, is another monument to his bleak vision. In the London exhibition, pictures of it were shown to the sound of beautiful classical Indian music, as if some intrinsic connection existed between the refined Indian civilization and ugly slabs of concrete. Le Corbusier’s staggering incompetence—the natural product of his inflexible arrogance—was revealed, no doubt unintentionally, by pictures of the large concrete square that he placed in Chandigarh, totally devoid of shade. It is as if he wanted the sun to shrivel up the human insects who dared to stain the perfect geometry of his plans with the irregularities that they brought with them.

His ahumanity makes itself evident also in his attitude toward the past. Repeatedly, he talks of the past as a tyranny from which it is necessary to escape, as if no one had discovered or known anything until his arrival. It is not that the past bequeaths us problems that we must try our best to overcome: it is that the entire past, with few exceptions, is a dreadful mistake best destroyed and then forgotten. His disdain for his contemporaries, except those who went over to him without reserve, is total: but a stroll through the Parisian suburb of Vincennes, to take only one example, should have been enough to convince him, or anyone else, that right up to World War I, architects had been capable of building differently from, but in harmony with, all that had gone before. These architects, however, were not mad egotists determined to obtrude their names permanently on the public, but men content to add their mite to their civilization. At no point does Le Corbusier discuss the problem of harmonizing the new with what already exists.

In denouncing Gothic architecture, for instance, Le Corbusier says:

Gothic architecture is not, fundamentally, based on spheres, cones and cylinders. . . . It is for that reason that a cathedral is not very beautiful. . . . A cathedral interests us as an ingenious solution to a difficult problem, but a problem of which the postulates have been badly stated because they do not proceed from the great primary forms.

So now we know why people like Chartres and Rheims Cathedrals! They solve badly formulated problems! Le Corbusier reminds me of the father of a Russian friend of mine, a man who was the greatest Soviet expert on plate glass, who, on visiting London for the first time, looked up at a modernist block of Corbusian design that ruined an eighteenth-century square and said, referring to some aspect of its plate glass, “That is an interesting solution to the problem.”

The most sincere, because unconscious, tribute to Le Corbusier comes from the scrawlers of graffiti. If you approach the results of their activities epidemiologically, so to speak, you will soon notice that, where good architecture is within reach of Corbusian architecture, they tend to deface only the Corbusian surfaces and buildings. As if by instinct, these uneducated slum denizens have accurately apprehended what so many architects have expended a huge intellectual effort to avoid apprehending: that Le Corbusier was the enemy of mankind.

Le Corbusier does not belong so much to the history of architecture as to that of totalitarianism, to the spiritual, intellectual, and moral deformity of the interbellum years in Europe. Clearly, he was not alone; he was both a creator and a symptom of the zeitgeist. His plans for Stockholm, after all, were in response to an official Swedish competition for ways to rebuild the beautiful old city, so such destruction was on the menu. It is a sign of the abiding strength of the totalitarian temptation, as the French philosopher Jean-François Revel called it, that Le Corbusier is still revered in architectural schools and elsewhere, rather than universally reviled.


Theodore Dalrymple, a physician, is a contributing editor of City Journal and the Dietrich Weismann Fellow at the Manhattan Institute. His most recent book is Not with a Bang but a Whimper.

City skyscraper era comes to an end

Square Mile's chief planner says current cluster of tall buildings will give way to large scale refurbishment of existing offices


The man behind a quarter of a century of City skyscrapers has declared that the next wave of tall towers will be the last in the Square Mile.

Twenty-five years on from the Big Bang, Peter Rees, the City of London's chief planning officer, said: "It will be an end of an era. The development is moving toward refurbishments of older buildings and, after the current cluster of skyscrapers, we will not see new ones planned.

"Since the Big Bang, London, like many other world cities, has wanted to replicate Manhattan with tall buildings. Here, in the City of London, we felt it better to cluster the tall buildings in one area and that is what has happened. But we are now entering a new phase, a new era."

The Lord Mayor of the City of London, Alderman Michael Bear, agrees and points to a new age of City offices. He said: "The new phase is refurbishment. But it is refurbishment with attitude – the stripping of an old building to its core and creating a brand new, economically relevant building.

"From 1986 onwards, the buildings have perfectly good floor plates and allow for complete redevelopment into modern, sustainable offices."

The current group of skyscrapers planned for the City over the next five years is expected to be the last for decades to come. The list comprises the recently completed Heron Tower, British Land's "Cheesegrater" (122 Leadenhall Street), Land Securities' "Walkie Talkie" tower at 20 Fenchurch Street, to be completed by 2014, Arab Investments' Pinnacle, to follow shortly after, and Great Portland Estates and Brookfield Properties' 100 Bishopsgate, to be built by 2016.

After this cluster, the City will see a series of large-scale refurbishments. One example is the planned redevelopment by giant US pension fund TIAA-CREF at One Angel Court – which will increase the available floor space by more than 50 per cent, to 300,000 sq ft.

Mr Rees, who has worked in the City of London's planning team for more than 26 years, added: "We have had 25 years of rapid redevelopment in the City – development that was necessary to replace the quickly built 1960s post-war buildings. Since Big Bang, we have seen a huge change from cellular offices to open plan. But we are now in a much better position, in that the buildings from the 1980s and 1990s are much more adaptable to today's office requirements than those from the 1950s, Sixties and Seventies."

Outside the City, after the Shard at London Bridge is completed next year, there could also be a lack of skyscrapers in the future.

Lack of finance and available new land are two of the reasons behind the reduction in large-scale construction. Rob Noel, Land Securities' managing director of the London portfolio, said: "Tower buildings take a very long time to plan and build, and all developers operate in a cyclical market. The current group were planned in the boom. I would say, never say never, but after this current period of planned towers, we will not see tall towers for a long time."

James Beckham, the international director in City investment at property agents Jones Lang LaSalle, agrees: "There is an increasing trend for large-scale refurbishment of buildings in the City. However, in special circumstances, particularly close to Bishopgate's tower cluster, we may still see new towers built in the longer term."

Laura Chesters
The independent
october 2011

Barcelona entre identidad y marca

Otra vez a las andadas entre lo global y local, Barcelona entre marca y ciudad

Acaso ha llegado el momento de abandonar las tendencias globalizadas y la política de los grandes nombres, y de apostar por la especificidad y la peculiaridad. Barcelona debería desempolvar aquella capacidad de reinventarse que la caracterizó en la época preolímpica.

Yo llegué a Barcelona con el oleaje preolímpico. Entonces, la euforia era genuina y el entusiasmo auténtico. La ciudad vivía en una tormenta de ideas continua y colectiva, que se plasmaba en una multitud de proyectos, iniciativas y eventos. Era la tierra prometida para cualquier periodista y aún más para una periodista italiana, de un país que alimenta la industria turística catalana con millones de visitantes, ávidos de información. Siempre había tema, porque Barcelona estaba decidida a hacerse un lugar en el imaginario colectivo y entre las ciudades que marcan tendencias. Eran los años en que la ciudad iba construyendo su nueva identidad y fue un verdadero privilegio vivirlos.

De aquellos años me acuerdo sobre todo de la sensación de energía, libertad y poder. Y aquella asombrosa capacidad de la ciudad de reinventarse, encontrando siempre nuevos motivos de interés y nuevos impulsos para la evolución urbanística, arquitectónica, cultural y también social. Los jóvenes artistas llegaban desde todo el mundo y la gente que encontrabas en los viajes te envidiaba por vivir en Barcelona.

En mi opinión, el problema surgió cuando se empezó a confundir el concepto de identidad con el de marca. Al principio era motivo de orgullo. La marca Barcelona se imponía con un paradigma basado en la puesta en valor del patrimonio histórico y la capacidad de impulsar la modernidad, sobre todo en el diseño y la arquitectura. En el ámbito de la gestión se iba consolidando un exitoso modelo basado en la complicidad entre las instituciones públicas y el sector privado, aquella burguesía iluminada, heredera de las familias que a principio del siglo XX tanta parte tuvieron en la creación del patrimonio que cada año atrae millones de visitantes. Un patrimonio que, más allá del disseny y la modernidad, sigue representando la mayor peculiaridad de Barcelona.

El modelo funcionaba bien, tan bien que se convirtió en un canon y, como tal, empezó a esclerotizarse y a estereotiparse. Por ejemplo, en el ámbito urbanístico y arquitectónico, al principio Barcelona supo ver sus limitaciones y subsanarlas con mayor o menor éxito. También se dio cuenta de la importancia de crear nuevos elementos icónicos, capaces de marcar el paisaje urbano así como el imaginario colectivo, y por ello se rodeó de los grandes nombres de la arquitectura internacional. Hasta aquí todo bien, pero el fichaje del arquitecto célebre terminó por convertirse en una obsesión, que hizo perder de vista, por un lado, la armonía formal del conjunto, y por el otro, el tejido creativo local, que en muchos casos se fue a buscar suerte por otros lares.

Quizás el fallo mayor fue permitir que los grandes logros fueran mermando la capacidad de autocrítica y dejaran prevalecer un cierto autoritarismo, que encuentra su ejemplo paradigmático en la cuestión de las plazas duras. Desde el principio la ciudadanía, apoyada por numerosos profesionales, demandó espacios verdes y expresó su rechazo hacia la estética del hormigón. Sin embargo, la tendencia no se corrigió y, aunque parezca increíble, sigue sin corregirse, a pesar de las críticas y aun cuando lo verdaderamente innovador sería optar por modelos ecológicos y sostenibles.

Nunca me pareció mal el connubio arte, cultura y desarrollo urbanístico, que tantos critican. Cuando, a propósito del Fórum de las Culturas, arreció la polémica, lo que me pareció fatal no fue la operación urbanística, sino haber creado un monstruo de cemento, inhóspito y de difícil gestión y manutención. En Castelldefels, donde vivo desde que llegué, he asistido a un proceso de desarrollo imparable y modélico, que sin embargo se ha hecho totalmente de espaldas a la naturaleza, sin respetar ni aprovechar las ventajas de las sinergias tanto a nivel estético como práctico.

Hace unos años se trasladaron a Castelldefels las facultades tecnológicas de varias universidades. El emplazamiento parecía hecho adrede para diseñar un campus que sirviera de enlace entre el pueblo y los barrios de la playa, con caminitos y recovecos, que ocultaran los edificios (grandes por necesidad) y crearan un entorno amable para sus usuarios. Con una calle ancha para los servicios habría sido más que suficiente, pero no. Indiferentes a las quejas, arrasaron con todo, distribuyeron las construcciones como en un Monopoly, eliminaron los desniveles naturales y la vegetación autóctona, y con ellos las zonas de sombras y la protección contra el viento. El enorme aparcamiento, con los coches que se fríen bajo el sol, confirma que quien allí estudia o trabaja se escapa tan pronto como puede. Entonces, ¿por qué la estrategia del hormigón sigue triunfando?, ¿por qué las nuevas reformas, que se están realizando con las financiaciones del Plan E, reiteran los mismos errores, desoyendo la voluntad de vecinos y profesionales?

Tras años de crecimiento continuo y sostenido, la llegada de la crisis ha hecho estragos. El constante aumento del coste de la vida, uno de los daños colaterales de la consolidación de la marca Barcelona en el mundo, no llegó nunca a corresponderse con el mismo incremento de la calidad de la oferta. La crisis ha subrayado el desequilibrio y, por primera vez en muchos años, la industria del turismo experimenta las hieles del descenso. La contradicción irresuelta de amor-odio, que sufren todas las ciudades que viven del turismo, parece más problemática que nunca. Barcelona quiere visitantes de calidad, interesados por el arte y la cultura, elegantes, sensibles y adinerados, pero no los conseguirá a golpe de ordenanzas con las más variadas prohibiciones, desde hacer skating hasta pasearse en atuendo de playa por la Rambla.

Quizás sea el momento de dejar de pensar en la marca Barcelona y volver a centrarse en cuestiones de identidad. Quizás sea el momento de abandonar las tendencias globalizadas y la política de los grandes nombres, y apostar por la especificidad y la peculiaridad y sobre todo desempolvar aquella capacidad de reinventarse, que tan fascinante y poderosa resultaba. El Canòdrom, el nuevo centro de arte, podría convertirse en un punto fuerte de irradiación, así como la red de fábricas para la creación, que combina el interés patrimonial, urbanístico y arquitectónico con la promoción y el apoyo del talento local (y por local entiendo todo aquel crisol de razas y nacionalidades que hace la fuerza de una ciudad realmente cosmopolita).

Barcelona debe volver a ser tierra de acogida para creadores de todo el mundo, así como lo fue durante unos años, antes de que la subida de los precios y la falta de infraestructuras e interés institucional les redirigiera hacia ciudades como Berlín, adonde también se han mudado varios artistas catalanes. Por su parte, los grandes equipamientos culturales deberían trabajar en la definición de nuevos formatos, alejados de la academia y del museo decimonónico y a la vez generar dinámicas de participación, más cercanas a la sensibilidad y las exigencias de las nuevas generaciones. Como cantaba Peret cuando llegué hace veinte años, “Barcelona tiene poder…”, el poder del Modernismo y el disseny, de la tradición y la innovación… el poder de su identidad y no de su marca.


Texto Roberta Bosco Periodista
metro 3
© Jordi Sàbat
Barcelona Metropolis
Verano (julio - septiembre 2010)

Una arquitectura autoctona

Una arquitectura autòctona

05/09/11 00:00 - Xavier Albertí

Published in Diari de Girona 5/9/11

Som un país ric en història i patrimoni. I un país admirat pels seus creatius, artistes de tot ordre i també arquitectes i dissenyadors. Per què respectem tan poc el nostre bagatge constructiu, reflex de la nostra història i manera de ser, obra sovint de mans anònimes que sense voler-s'ho proposar la interpretaven plenament?

Tenim nuclis històrics cuidats. És molt remarcable la transformació del Barri Vell de Girona i ho va ser al seu dia la recuperació i posada al dia de la fesomia més atractiva de Barcelona. L'una i l'altra van requerir un treball convençut i conseqüent de polítics i tècnics municipals. Una actuació atrevida i no exempta de discussions per afectar interessos i criteris particulars, però que al final ha merescut una aprovació general. Però en quin estat tenim tants de pobles i les nostres masies, “l'essència de la vida catalana”, en paraules de l'arquitecta Tagliabue?

No és pas que s'hagi caigut en l'abandó, és l'avidesa constructiva, l'afany de modernitat a ultrança, la manca de sensibilitat estètica i de respecte a la tradició i una displicència excessiva dels ajuntaments respecte als particulars en l'execució i restauració d'uns edificis que creen paisatge el que ens ha perdut. Hem afegit al caos regnant en l'urbanisme tardofranquista una sobreexplotació planificada basada massa sovint en la banalització estètica: cases arrenglerades, pisos impersonals, estandardització urbanística i interpretacions pintoresques de l'arquitectura tradicional en els nuclis rurals.

No negarem pas que molts dels nuclis històrics més singulars s'han agençat amb més encert o menys i que s'ha dut a terme més d'una obra pública lloable en la creació de places i rehabilitació d'edificis monumentals. Però ens manca de bon tros una harmonia general de país, la sensació d'equilibri, de gust per allò propi, de sobrietat, que ens dóna passejar nord enllà. Quin ha de ser el criteri per rehabilitar un mas o una casa de poble i adaptar-lo a les noves necessitats sense caure en el folklorisme? Com han de ser les nostres cases aïllades, cada cop més comunes, perquè mantinguin un vincle amb el nostre llegat arquitectònic?

Cal que els nostres tècnics i creadors recuperin l'esperit d'una arquitectura d'arrel sense complexes que no ha d'estar tampoc oposada al cosmopolitisme i la modernitat, com ho havia plantejat al seu dia el noucentisme. Qui gosaria parlar avui d'arquitectura, art o disseny nacional sense por de ser titllat de retrògrad? No existeix un disseny escandinau o italià o una arquitectura anglesa per voluntat de la seva comunitat? No heu pensat que si no existeix un disseny català, amb segell definitori, havent-hi com hi ha tants creadors individuals, és perquè no ens ho creiem prou i perquè tampoc les institucions hi ajuden? I el mateix podríem dir de l'arquitectura: quant de temps s'esmerça a les nostres facultats a estudiar la tradició autòctona a més dels memorables arquitectes universals contemporanis? Per què no cultivem entre la ciutadania el gust per la simplicitat heretada de segles?

Ens convé com el pa que mengem recuperar la senzillesa i el bon gust; evitar estridències, siguin brillants o vulgars; respectar sobretot els espais forans que fan poble, i país. Ens cal mantenir l'edifici amb història amb la intervenció justa i dissenyar uns models de futur amb caràcter propi: unes cases d'avui, però també d'aquí.